More of Schroedinger's Cat From the Bush League Administration

The putrescence of politicians that runs our rapidly decaying nation continues “damage control” concerned with the latest supposed revelation of federal government assault on the one restraint still possibly effective against their Brobdingnagian excesses, that being the U.S. Constitution.

I said “supposed” because I know, first hand, better than this is being made to appear.

We’re being told that the Bush League’s latest sally against Jeffersonian Democracy, the illegal wire-tapping, had to do only with international calls and communication (just a little vague on exactly how much of the wide possibility that might include, huh?) from outside in; or was it inside out, or just overseas – what? Who knows? Who cares?

If I look with what seems a jaundiced eye, it’s because this same U.S. Government bugged my phone, read my mail – even my damned newspapers and magazines, matter of fact – thirty years ago, between the Missouri and Mississippi rivers and the state lines of Missouri and Minnesota, for the supposed purpose of income tax collection courts later said I didn’t owe. Now that I think of it, though, the U.S. District Court did say that my records were a matter of national security. That no one could figure out how the hell that was – not even the U.S. Attorney on the case could explain it – should come as no surprise to anyone following this, the latest outbreak of Texas legal procedure and tortured linguistics raised to a national scale.

Anybody watching the Tom Delay circus? It isn’t money-laundering if you write a check. Some of us once thought that was the classic example. No more, I guess. Anyway, that’s Tom’s legal defense, and in Texas, it will probably work.

Anyway, this, the newest “F- you” for proponents of the Fourth Amendment has quickly taken on the Schrödinger’s cat reality which characterizes everything this government does. Things are both true and false, directions are both up and down, geometry is both outside and inside. Maybe positively. Positively maybe.

The language is being tortured – that’s okay now even where human beings are concerned, you know - yet again, words so far removed from context as to make you wonder whether they’re even part of the English language, and the U.S. Constitution doesn’t mean what you think it means. There is a part of “no” you don’t understand. The lawyers will decide. One thing seems clear, that “unreasonable” in the Fourth Amendment is unreasonable. The President will decide that.

The President wants us to bear with him, too. “Just this little bit” (“unreasonableness,” remember?), “and I won’t ask for more.” And we are supposed to be encouraged that the courts will decide. Sure, just like the FISA court decided this one. Remember Roe vs. Wade? That monument to high court jurisprudential and political sucking up made it legal to kill anyone in the first trimester of his life. Just that, proponents for reduction of national and societal mores said, and we’ll be satisfied. If you believed that, you’ll believe the government where your privacy is concerned.

The beauty of crime by the government – at least as far as they are concerned – is they go ahead and do it; then we get to debate whether they should have – was it “unreasonable,” or wasn’t it – later. When you get to do that each time, in each new instance, it amounts pretty much to carte blanche, doesn’t it? Pretty much the same thing as “totalitarian” or “tyrannical,” huh?

Oh, and for the ex FBI wonk on Span this morning, the guy caviling on the ninth part of the “unreasonable searches and seizures” phrase in the Fourth Amendment hair: sir, school children ninth grade or higher – bright ones even sooner – know that that means “without a warrant.” Lawyers know it, too – some of them. They even know that the courts have so ruled literally hundreds of times.

Are you still reading Dr. Seuss?